I met a promising young app developer at Microsoft in Cambridge the other day, which wouldn’t be unusual except for one key fact: He’s 8 years old.

Mohamed Tariq Jaffar Ali (he goes by Tariq) is the author of a Windows Phone app called Kids Zone that aggregates online videos from popular cartoons, like “Tom and Jerry” and “SpongeBob SquarePants.” It culls YouTube for relevant clips and sorts them into channels.

“That’s the data source,” Tariq told me.

Typical third-grade stuff, right?

Actually, the crazy thing about Tariq’s story is that a lot of other kids his age could do the same thing. He’s uncommonly bright, sure, but it’s not like he spends his days learning Python instead of playing with friends. He simply tagged along with his father, Jaffar, to a Nokia DVLUP Day in Boston in November, and decided to join other novices in a class about App Studio, a simple development tool for Windows Phone that doesn’t require coding skills.

Tariq completed Kids Zone in just a few hours, beating Jaffar, a software engineer who took an advanced course and needed more time to finish his own app the hard way. Kids Zone has been downloaded almost 500 times and has users in such far-flung places as Kenya, Malaysia and the Netherlands.

Microsoft didn’t have 8-year-olds in mind when it designed App Studio, but accessibility was a key objective, said Bob Familiar, the company’s director of technical evangelism for the Northeast.

“The idea is that anyone can become an app developer,” he said.

Next up for Tariq is an app about the solar system, or possibly national capitals. You know, something more serious for when he turns 9.

Read More

In this weekend's Boston Globe Magazine, business columnist Shirley Leung writes about InnerCity Weightlifting, the Dorchester gym that has provided a source of support and job opportunities to formerly incarcerated men by helping them become personal trainers. For the past two years, founder Jon Feinman has been pairing members of the gym with employees at Microsoft's New England headquarters for training sessions. Now he plans to take the idea one step further and open a gym in the heart of the Cambridge tech community. As Leung writes:

Come February or so, his theory will face the ultimate test when he opens a gym in Kendall Square, the playground of computer geniuses, scientists, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs. It’s an expensive proposition for a nonprofit — a $1.5 million lease over five years, for which InnerCity Weightlifting is still fund-raising. But Feinman, InnerCity’s founder and executive director, feels certain this is exactly where his program needs to be if the goal is to get men on a path out of their dangerous world and into one with possibilities. “We felt it was a greater risk not to make this investment,” says 31-year-old Feinman, who himself worked as a personal trainer and earned an MBA from Babson College before launching InnerCity.
...
The concept is so starkly simple you can’t help but wonder if it could succeed. Can we lift people up from the bottom by exposing them to the people at the top?

A little more than five years ago, I wrote about a re-org at Microsoft's internal Startup Labs product development group. It turned out to be curtains for the Cambridge-based team, led by Reed Sturtevant — even though their old Web address still optimistically implores visitors to "please come back later." But five years on, it's clear the 2009 shakeup and ensuing departures freed up a number of people who've gone on to pollinate the local startup scene.
Read More

This morning, the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences announced that Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft and '77 alum, will be committing support to the expansion of the computer science program, a move that will increase the number of faculty by 50 percent.
Read More

It's been about 17 months since Edward Snowden leaked details about the National Security Agency's tracking practices, information that triggered a firestorm of investigations into the US government's access to private data and the way technology companies secured and shared consumer information.
On Tuesday, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith spoke at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, facing an audience that included some of the loudest critics of the NSA's activities in the US.
Read More

A robotic doctor built for space travel and a camera that can track your body’s health by peering into your retina are two finalists in the Nokia Sensing XChallenge. Both technologies are built in Cambridge.Read More